Duty Calls

Blog 4-

Write a poem or prose paragraph in a style that is rather like Virginia Woolf illustrating an ordinary mind (perhaps your mind) on an ordinary day.

Emily lay crumpled in the sheets hearing the day but willing her ears not to listen. The older ones already busy with the productive routine they had adopted more out of necessity to make up for her lackings in motherhood than out of good raising. Hearing them Emily felt pride for their grown up capabilities but tasted a salty disappointment of her failings and guilt. Had she failed them already, not even teens yet; surely if she could just drag herself out of the safe warmth they would not grow up with the damage she felt when thoughts came of her own childhood.

He lay curled next to her still small enough to climb in half aslumber in the early hours without waking her. She should break the bad habit she reminded herself, but he will out grow her soon; her bed, her cuddles, her— so she will leave it then she decided breathing him in (heat of summer days, delicious stickiness, dirt)–He was still her baby but at five didn’t smell of fresh human life anymore, he had life’s imprint on him now and the perfume of a boy no longer an infant. He had been perfection; she remembered holding him- that first moment had fixed everything broken inside her, coming from inside her somehow leaving her and giving her everything all in that one act of being born. Completed—but where had that gone, why was it so hard to hold onto to that? It strained her.

Stretching and preening one long dimpled limb and then the next, reluctantly committing to rising. She felt one foot scratch on the rug; her other begged a different fate and if it wasn’t for the children she might listen but today was no different to the others and her duty called, called loudly. Motherhood with its blue-black sky made only bearable by the sharp bright rays that shone through occasionally, like him lying there steady breathed and pale warm complexion, heaven. Well until he wakes she remembered. “I’m coming” Emily answered.

In the above paragraph I have tried to take an ordinary moment in my day and portray it in the stream of conscious style of writing of Virginia Woolf. I have tried to use her seamless shifting between 3rd person and 1st person to reveal inner thoughts as well as her unconventional punctuation to illustrate the battle between internal thoughts and external world intrusions on those thoughts. Her ability to discuss and pose larger concepts through every day events was one I really wanted to portray and hopefully have been able to express in the limited length of this blog post.